|
|
HomeGraffitiAboutSitemapVisualDevWork
Email BrianGPG Key |
GRAFFITI -- August 30, 2004 thru September 05, 2004>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
|
MONDAY
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
August 30, 2004
2243 - Good evening. Sorry, but there's no post here. It may have gotten lost in the post, or it's lead got tangled on the hitching post, or perhaps someone just went postal. The greater likelihood, however, is that I got busy with other things work related jumping right out of the gate, and never got around to it. See you tomorrow!
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
August 31, 2004
0817 - Good morning. I'm still short on time, but I managed to get one of the MOV files out of the new camera, and down-shifted to a "small" AVI file, only about 1.3M... not something you necessarily want over your dialup line in order to see dogs running about in our back yard for a few seconds. But for what it's worth, here it is: dogs0004.avi. The plan for today is to get all of the services that are currently being handled by an RH8 box running on duplicate hardware and Debian, then pull a switcheroo. Might even be fun. Have a great day!
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 1, 2004
0637 - Good morning. Another geeky day coming up (well, duh!). Yesterday I took a Debian Sarge box from vanilla install to running solid Bind9, Mailman+Postfix and Jakarta/Tomcat4, all pretty much from package builds. Only one hitch, I fell back on using the Sun J2SDK since I was having trouble with the SSL/TLS portion of the Tomcat setup. That fallback was after more than an hour of Googling the problem, trying to find out how to do Tomcat TLS support with Kaffe. Of course, once I had the stinking thing running properly with the Sun SDK, I found the line that told me (probably) how to run things OK with Kaffe and Jessie. So if that works today, then I'll unload the Sun SDK, leaving me with a cleanly updateable Debian installation.
In other news, we finally (after weeks of fruitless asking, waiting and asking again) go the specifications for serial communications with the new electronic signs that we'll have to support. Nothing too special, but without the spec, the job was looking like a nightmare of reverse engineering. Now we can write a little socket listener to handle communications to the beasts through the Digiboard 16 Port box, and design a simple API that any number of processes can write to, to get the appropriate data up on the wall.
With the handy, dandy gripping hand, I've volunteered to do some article proofreading for the next issue of LG.net. I'm also greedily awaiting my review copy of Building the Perfect PC, both to put it to use one of these days soon, as well as getting a review up on Amazon.com. And of course I'm waiting until I get my copy of Burning Tower - after I've read it once, I'll send it on to Jerry to get his Hancock on it, and Niven's, to match my signed first edition of The Burning City. Hmm, I wonder why Barnes & Noble isn't even listing Burning Tower yet? It's been up for pre-order at Amazon for at least a couple of weeks now.
Okay, time for another early start. Have a great day, and I'll do the same.
Mon
Tues
Wed
THURSDAY
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 2, 2004
0658 - Good morning. A change in plans for today - I'm stopping in Wheaton for a software attitude adjustment, before continuing to a client site in Gaithersburg. Then after lunch it's back down to the NERDS office in Silver Spring for fun with a variety of short in-office client tasks. Last night was lost to reconfiguring Thunderbird multiple times in a vain attempt to get custom X-headers wedged into outgoing mail. I've got a legitimate need to do so, but have yet to find a way there. The two seemingly useful links pointed me to modifications in user.js, down in my Thunderbird profile directory. But those do nothing at all, no complaints from T-bird, but also no extra headers. In trying out the effects of a couple of different extensions, I managed to make my installation blow hot and cold, so I started with a fresh folder, and rebuilt my accounts. That's not as bad as you might think, because all of my mailstores are remote: IMAP. Additionally, I've no local filtering rules, as of those all happen serverside. So I only had to create my accounts, close T-bird, copy over my abook.mab file from the old .thunderbird folder that I'd saved, and life is golden once again.
Now it is time. Hitting the road, I hope you have a great day, too!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
September 3, 2004
0645 - Good morning. Yesterday saw most of what had to get done, done. I still don't have a way to get custom X-Headers into outgoing email from Mozilla Thunderbird. I've finished rebuilding my T-bird environment back to a happy state, and played a bit of UT2003 last night, too. That's really all I had energy for. Ooooh wait, there's some pictures hiding around here someplace.
 |
 |
 |
Two dogs in state, and last night's sky in a state of grace. It was glorious. Sunsets are Nature's way of reminding me that the world is a lot bigger than I let it be most of the time. Okay, time to go small again... there is one more long working day ahead. Then, on tap for the weekend, I've got one more shelf to make for Marcia's office, a spot of cleanup downstairs, some major house cleaning, and that's about it. Not much yardwork, as the lack of rain stopped the grass in it's tracks. I'll actually need to water in a couple of spots to keep the reseed alive, but it is doing very well, thanks for asking.
Tonight we'll watch a movie. Marcia's picked out Pirates of the Caribean: Curse of the Black Eyeliner for our viewing entertainment. Also I'm going to give my friend Jim a call and set a weekend for our hiking trip - a two day short trek along a patch of the Appalachian Trail. Hmmm. Seems like there's always plenty to do, eh?
Speaking of plenty to do, no, I've not heard any more back from Laura, my agent, about the Linux book I proposed. The last round of feedback from me to them was more than three weeks ago, and there's not been a peep since. Personally, I think that's rude. I'm going to not wait on pins and needles. If other commitments come up that prevent me from accepting an offer down the road, I'll not wait. And if this doesn't come through toot-sweet, then I'm going to get myself removed from Studio B's rolodexes. I've just about had it with getting my hopes up, then having the deal fail for one reason or another. What was that definition of insanity, again?
The Last Word for today is Whew! Please note that the GOP convention ended last night. Two items of significance there: First, the world didn't end, nor did the terror-dinks take out the Garden in an attempt on the Shrub. (I thought that was an appropriate venue for the GOP Convention, under the circumstances, didn't you?). Second (yes, second, that nor was just an addendum), I made it through the summer of 2004 without seeing any of EITHER convention or ANY of the Olympics on the tube. None, zero, zip, ziltch. How much did they charge you, GM, for those commercials? Proctor & Gamble? Levitra? I didn't see any of them. If you paid them so that I would see those commercials ... well, you get the picture. Oh, yeah. I'll be voting for Libertarian Michael Badnarik for President. He's on the ballot in almost every state now - vote for him, or vote your heart or vote your wallet, but register NOW, and VOTE in November.
Okay, time to roll. Have a great day!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
September 4, 2004
0920 - Good morning. I've been wasting time browsing about this morning. I read the article on Wesley Weber, the Canadian counterfeiter who probably put $16 million worth of extra currency into the Canadian economy. And they say that's not a good contribution, eh? Interesting read, thanks for that timesink, Slashdot!
Here are some other tidbits. You need to know about Autoit. Did I say this before? Nope, the search tool says not. Autoit is now in version 3, and somehow I've never seen nor heard of it before a couple of weeks ago when a link turned up on the Infrastructures mailing list. What is Autoit?
AutoIt v3 is an opensource BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys).
AutoIt was initially designed for PC "roll out" situations to configure thousands of PCs, but with the arrival of v3 it is also well suited to performing home automation and the scripting of repetitive tasks.
And it works for me. This seems to be one of those "if you need it, you need it badly" sorts of tools. It doesn't hurt that this is a GPL licensed project. But just remember, free as in speech doesn't mean that you shouldn't pay/donate/contribute if you find the code/project useful, especially business-wise.
Next up, this useful email about ethereal and netcat turned up in my box from the SVLUG mailing list the other day...
The first thing to do when you have any kind of network problem like this is to run ethereal, the wonderful packet/stream capture/analyzer program. (Someone told me about it at an SVLUG installfest -- many thanks!)
Here's the command I use to run it (you have to be root):
ethereal -i eth0 -k -S -t a -f 'not arp'-i eth0 -- selects the network card; use -i ppp0 if you're on a modem
-k -- starts capturing immediately (or omit it and start manually)
-S -- updates the display in real time
-t a -- stamps the packet list entries with clock time
-f 'not arp' -- filters out the Address Resolution Protocol packets that my cable-internet provider constantly bombards my machine with. If you don't get them, then you don't need this filter specification, although it won't hurt anything.
So then contact your mail server or whatever, and when it's done and has thrown the error, stop ethereal from capturing packets. Then look in the packet listing window, find one of packets from the interaction with the server, click on it, go to the Tools menu, and select "Follow TCP Stream".
You'll get a window showing the complete two-way conversation in ASCII, with the two directions distinguished by red and blue coloration!
With any luck the reason for the error will be mentioned by the remote server, or you'll be able to see something that isn't right just before the error occurs. I don't know anything about imap; you might have to look at some individual packets instead of a tcp stream, but ethereal will display the data in those packets in human-readable form -- to dig down into it just click on the packet tree structure shown in the window underneath the packet list.
The information you need may also be tucked away in a log file somewhere, but ethereal is so easy and so much fun to use, and so educational (it can analyze and display all the fields in virtually any kind of packet), that I always try it first.
You can also use ethereal to help capture information from a remote server, with the help of another program, netcat. Netcat establishes a tcp/ip connection with whatever remote ip-address and port number that you specify, and sends it everything you put into netcat's standard input. Everything the remote sends back comes out of netcat's standard output.
I used to use wget to capture mp3 webradio streams to a file, but some mp3 servers would quit sending after the first few packets. Wget is not designed for this function, and apparently doesn't always do the right handshaking, or maybe it's the one that sometimes quits.
So I used the xmms sound player to listen to one of these streams, and recorded the initial conversation using ethereal, as above. Then wrote a bash script to run netcat, connect it to a specified remote port, and send it the right information to make the mp3 server there happy (only part of what xmms sent was needed). Then the script takes the output from netcat and stores it in a specified file. It uses a tiny C program to snip off the ASCII header at the beginning of the mp3 stream; this is probably unnecessary -- the header might just make a little click -- but the script prints the header to the screen, so if the connection doesn't go through you can read the diagnostic information in it and find out why.
Ethereal and netcat -- your eyes and hands on the network!
Cool and fun stuff! Thanks for posting that, Mark! And with that, I'll find a way to get into a bit more of an active mode here. Otherwise I might as well just go back to bed and write the day off... Oh, here's the latest (and final, I think) addition to Marcia's desk - a bridging shelf to take the printer/fax off the desk surface:
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
SUNDAY
September 5, 2004
1422 - Good afternoon. Shopping done, more chores in progress. It's not nearly the relaxing weekend I proposed, but more details later. I don't want to stop for too long, or I'll not get started again. Later...
1651 - Hullo, again. All of the chores I didn't plan are done, I think. You may recall that I got a bit heady in my nature-taming mode by trimming out the hedges around the back deck last weekend. Well, I completed the expression of my pruning-self this weekend and cleaned up lots of the plant matter around the place: trees, shrubs, weed/vine clean-out... (9) 33 gallon trashbags full. I did the back yard yesterday, and the front right side today. Oh, and all of the right front flowerbed Marigolds were done for, so that's a bare patch of red bark mulch now, in front of decorative grasses.The front left side plantings, near the back yard gates, well, it needs work, but I don't know what I'm going to do there yet, so I'll just leave those plants alone for now.
Then, in back just now, I potted four new Hardy Asters, in white. They replace some formerly spectacular, but lately pathetic Pansies. I also ripped out the yellow Straw Flower, as it's final blooms for the season were rapidly waning. Plus I edited the potted garden, taking the coriander and two varieties of Basil out for harvesting, leaving just the plants you see at left (plus the new Asters). The patch of lawn that once was my garden is coming back in fairly nicely (shown at right) - the new grass is considerably greener than the mixture of crap, broad and blue grass that makes up the balance of the back lawn.
I still have a bit of cleanup to do in the woodshop downstairs, and house vacuuming to do, but that's definitely lower energy requirements than I have needed for the last two days. I'll get to those items tomorrow.
Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week
Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2011 Brian P. Bilbrey.
Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under the
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.